Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz)
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What is Bolt and how did it achieve $40 M ARR in just five months?
The rate you're growing is absurd. You're in this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that we've never seen in the history of startups.
The company was on the verge of going under when we launched Bolt. And what ended up happening is in the first two months, we we went from zero to twenty million of ARR. And we've already crossed thirty million of ARR with the current rate we're on. Our forecast for the year is we want to get to a hundred million of ARR.
This is just uh nonstop wild shit. How is this possible? What has allowed you to grow this much this fast with such a small team?
Most importantly, it's been the people. It's rare to find startups where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus.
You basically were building a a tech first and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often what people tell you not to do.
I think that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur. There are periods of time where you have to make judgment calls that are not gonna be the consensus view. You gotta have like confidence in your convictions on how the best play of the hand.
A lot of people see these stats and they sometimes don't see that there was also years and years of of work before that. It
was kind of like you know, both this overnight success seven years in the making.
Today, my guest is Eric Simons. Eric is co-founder and CEO of Stack Blitz, which makes a product called Bolt, which is currently neck and neck with Cursor for being the fastest growing product in history. They are currently the number one most popular web AI code app with over 3 million registered users. Two months after launching last October, they hit 20 million ARR. At the time of this recording, they're approaching 40. 40 million ARR. The story of Bolt is wild. They actually started the company seven years ago and were about to run out of money and shut down. But they realized the tech that they'd been building for the past seven years called Web Container was perfectly suited for building AI products in the browser, so they launched the product with a tweet, and as Eric describes it, it was an overnight success, seven years in the making.
If you'd like to better understand the cutting edge, Of AI coding apps and where things are going with AI and product building, this episode is a must listen. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Perplexity Pro, Notion, Linear, Granola, and Superhuman. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Eric Simons. This episode is brought to you by EPO. Epo is a next generation A B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Epo to power their experiments.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Bolt and how did it achieve $40 M ARR in just five months?
0:00–14:07
2
How did a tiny team of 15‑20 people grow to millions of users so quickly?
14:07–27:57
3
What is WebContainer technology and why is it critical to Bolt’s speed?
27:57–40:46
4
Why does the Anthropic 3.5 Sonnet model matter for AI‑generated code?
40:46–54:29
5
How are product managers and designers becoming the primary users of AI coding tools?
54:29–1:07:40
6
What lessons did the team learn about scaling, pricing, and handling rapid growth?
1:07:40–1:19:19
7
What new features (Figma import, Slack bot, etc.) are coming to Bolt next?
1:19:19–1:28:19
8
What’s the single piece of advice for a first‑time Bolt user to get the best results?
1:28:19–1:28:47
Speakers
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